Can I override CMS and use 301s to redirect in-site keyword links?

[prfb]

I have a site with an archive of around 5k (unique) articles about the Widget industry, tagged with roughly 50 keywords for the Widget Brands they talk about.

The CMS I'm using puts links for each keyword at the bottom of each article (example.com/keyword/Acme_Widgets), and the links go to a page that lists all the other articles with that keyword.

I'd prefer those links went my Guides to each brand, both for users' benefit and because I'd like to signal the Guides' importance to Google.

So, can I just add a 301 redirect from /keyword/Acme_Widgets --> /guide/Acme_Widgets ?

Would this convey all the benefits of "true" within-site links? Any risks?

[kamikaze Optimizer]

So, can I just add a 301 redirect from /keyword/Acme_Widgets --> /guide/Acme_Widgets ?

You should 301 redirect and hard code the old links to the new links.

You will see that Google will find the new links fast and remove the old links from the index this way.

Risk? Always when you change the navigation (flow) of a site you have risk, but from my understanding you are not changing the true content pages so it should be minimal.

[prfb]

Thanks, kO. How important is it to hard-code the change?

I'd rather not hack my CMS, and it's not hard-coding friendly.

FWIW, there are plenty of articles G hasn't indexed yet (it's slow but steady), so even if it didn't revise anything that's already indexed I'll still have plenty pointing to my Guides (eventually).

[kamikaze Optimizer]

You will need to have links to the new pages, then you can robot.txt deny access to the old if hard coding out the old links is an issue.

But you will still need links to the new pages.

[prfb]

Drat. Removing old links is easy -- they're an auto-generated block at the bottom that can easily be turned off, it's part of the CMS.

It's generating new links on 5,000 articles that'll be a pain. I'll need to figure out a systematic way to do this, something that'll read the keyword link and figure out an appropriate guide link.

[kamikaze Optimizer]

What CMS is it?

[prfb]

Drupal 5. I think I found a good solution: there's a module called Related Links that judges related-ness by keyword. Then I tell it to only include Guides (they're a separate content type, thank goodness), and put the main page for each brand as "sticky at top of lists".

I've just put it up, and it looks good. =)

[kamikaze Optimizer]

Good, I am glad. I was going to suggest that you do something like that if it was written in PHP.